The determination of whether food has spoiled is of interest to a large number of people ranging from the food producer to the consumer, including grocers, regulators, importers, exporters, and brokers. Many food products can spoil, including grains, fruits, and vegetables. However, one of the greatest areas of concern is spoilage of red meat, pork, poultry, processed meat products, and seafood. Spoiled foods pose many risks, chief among which is illness caused by consuming the food. Such illnesses may be life-threatening, especially for very young or very old consumers, as well as persons with compromised immune systems.
Many foods are now packaged and/or frozen to retard spoilage. Unfortunately, packaged and frozen foods, which account for a large number of the available red meat, pork, poultry, processed meat, and seafood products, are harder to test for spoilage. Packaged food often needs to be unwrapped, examined, and then repackaged if acceptable. Frozen food typically needs to be thawed in order to determine the quality of the food by current techniques, which often rely on color, smell, and texture. One method still used by the United States Food and Drug Administration for the testing of seafood is organoleptic analysis. This method requires thawing the seafood followed by an olfactory analysis by highly trained experts to determine the condition of the food.
Devices for ascertaining the quality of frozen food, which do not require thawing the food, do exist. However, such devices are typically bulky and are not readily available and/or easily operated and interpreted by inexperienced individuals, such as consumers and grocers.
There is a need for a simple, quick, and effective device for determining the quality of food products to indicate if they are unsafe due to spoilage. In addition, there is a need for a device that can be packaged with food products which is effective in all typical food storage conditions, including temperatures below 0° C. Such a device should be made of materials that are suitable for use with food products and do not contain or generate harmful chemicals. In addition, the device should provide indications of food quality that are easily read and understood by all or nearly all of the population.